Duplicate content with same URL?

[Mike.Goracke]

SEOmoz is saying that I have duplicate content on:

• http://www.XXXX.com/content.asp?ID=ID
• http://www.XXXX.com/CONTENT.ASP?ID=ID

The only difference I see in the URL is that the "content.asp" is capitalized in the second URL.

Should I be worried about this or is this an issue with the SEOmoz crawl?

Thanks for any help.

Mike

[Matt-Williamson]

Use canonicalization to resolve this common duplicate content issue.

You need to place the canonical tag pointing to your preferred URL.

See this SeoMoz guide on how to do it -

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content

See

Rel="canonical"

this actually uses the example of capitalization and one page appearing as three to search engines...

Hope this helps!

[Mike.Goracke]

You sir are a gentleman and a scholar.

Thanks for your help Matt.

[sweetfancymoses]

Modern search engines won't penalize you for this, but you may lose link juice if your content has multiple URLs and each is receiving links.  Best practice is to set up a few simple PHP mod_rewrite rules in your .htaccess for basic URL display issues (enforce trailing backslash, redirect to/away from www, etc.), as well as to declare your preferred URL in the HTML of each page using this handy .

Here's a great tutorial how to force lower-case URLs written by a fellow Mozzer (props, Chris!  It's how I learned...), and here's 10 other useful mod_rewrites to add to your repertoire.

[PatioLifeStyle]

I have a similar problem, and I couldn't see a solution on the site that your link refers to. Maybe you can help?

In both SEOmoz reports and GWT I get duplicate meta descriptions and/or duplicate title tags on pages that do not physically (or logically) exist. I'm not talking about dynamically generated URLs. What I see is for a given page, several other appended pages that have no relationship to the first, like this:

/realpage1.php/anotherrealpage1.html
/realpage1.php/adifferentrealpage2.html
/realpage1.php/anotherrealpage3.php
/realpage1.php/directory/realpage4.html

Perhaps related to this issue, I discovered that if a trailing slash is entered after any URL typed into the browser (other than the home page), our custom 404 page appears, but with no CSS styling or active javascript.

I have been wondering if a rewrite rule that eliminates trailing slashes would work, but then it would never display a sub-directory's default index page, right?

I've searched all over for some help with this, to no avail. Any help will be much appreciated.

[sweetfancymoses]

Are you specifying the URL rewrite rule at the page level, or in your .htaccess?  I had a similar issue once on a WordPress Multisite install that was rewriting

example.com/site2 -> site2.com
And:
example.com/site3 -> site3.com

The issue wasn't "real" in that the users' browsers were moving to the preferred URLs specified in the HTTP headers, but our crawl tests were a nightmare of non-existent files much like yours.  Rel="canonical" will help in that case to avoid penalties, but won't do any favors for page rank or indexation.  I believe our developers created some additional page-level rewrites to deal with the phantom pages created in the crawl, but alas, I'm not sure what the details were.

You might post in a new thread or reach out to Chris Abernethy directly, he's far savvier with PHP than I am.

[PatioLifeStyle]

I am not using a rewrite rule yet -- I was asking if there is one that would resolve this issue.